Source: Children’s Health Defense

A California pediatrician is suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over a federal program that requires doctors in her state who treat children enrolled in Medicaid to give those children all of the vaccines recommended by the CDC.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is supporting the lawsuit, filed April 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Santa Ana Division.

Dr. Samara Cardenas lost her medical practice after the CDC Vaccines for Children Program kicked her out of the program because she wouldn’t give COVID-19 vaccines to healthy kids.

California, like most states, requires pediatricians who treat Medicaid patients to be enrolled in the Vaccines for Children Program. The program, in turn, requires doctors to strictly follow the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule.

In late 2023, the Vaccines for Children Program informed Cardenas that her vaccine orders “were being scrutinized” for not including COVID-19 shots. She was later expelled from the program. As a result, she lost her Medicaid contract, forcing her to close her practice.

The Vaccines for Children Program primarily serves low-income populations by providing free vaccines to uninsured or underinsured children and children who are eligible for or enrolled in Medicaid. Medicaid compensates pediatricians for the costs associated with administering the vaccines.

In her first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Cardenas alleges the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection and due process provisions by subjecting children enrolled in Medicaid to different treatment standards and compelling doctors to act against their professional judgment.

The lawsuit also questions the safety and necessity of administering COVID-19 vaccines to children, the inclusion of COVID-19 shots on the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule and the impartiality of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine-related recommendations.

In California, 3 in 7 — or about 5 million children — are enrolled in Medicaid. Nationally, about 40% of all kids — or about 29.2 million children ages 0-17 — are covered by Medicaid.

The suit names CDC Acting Director Susan P. Monarez, as the defendant. Monarez is also President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency.

Cardenas ‘followed her conscience and the science’

Attorney Rick Jaffe, who represents Cardenas, said this is “the first federal lawsuit challenging the CDC’s coercive use of the VFC [Vaccines for Children] program to enforce experimental, emergency-authorized COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of Medicaid access.”

Cardenas “followed her conscience and the science,” Jaffe said. “The VFC framework gave her no choice: vaccinate all kids or lose access.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel, said the lawsuit places policies that disproportionately affect Medicaid recipients under scrutiny, as the Vaccines for Children Program’s policy “essentially mandates these experimental shots for a population historically vulnerable to medical experimentation.”

Cardenas is not seeking compensatory damages. Instead, the lawsuit “seeks to compel the CDC to abandon its misguided and scientifically untethered policy, and stop the unnecessary mass vaccination of the nation’s poorest children.”

“We’re asking the court to say the government can’t make scientific compliance a prerequisite to serving poor patients,” Jaffe said.

Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro said that by requiring physicians to administer all vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule, “medical autonomy is abolished” while “low-income children are left with fewer options and less continuity of care.”

Perro said many doctors are reluctant to oppose these policies. “The threat of speaking out is financial ruin and the potential loss of their ability to practice,” Perro said. “This is coercion and harassment.”

‘The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children’

In October 2022, ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, unanimously recommended adding COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old to the CDC childhood schedule.

The complaint alleges that before making that recommendation, the CDC failed “to compile and analyze vaccine injury data.” It also alleges that ACIP is “compromised by conflicts of interest,” as many of its members “have financial or professional ties to vaccine manufacturers or related interests” — for which the CDC has granted conflict-of-interest waivers.

According to the complaint, by not presenting evidence of the vaccine’s clinical benefit, ACIP violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law banning government agency actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

The lawsuit cites data from the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) showing reports of “hundreds of thousands of adverse events” related to the COVID-19 vaccines, including “serious adverse events and deaths.”

As of March 28, VAERS listed 72,924 reports of adverse events in people 18 and younger, including 6,122 serious adverse events and 201 deaths.

Albert Benavides, a VAERS expert and founder of VAERSAware.com, said the true figures are higher, as many VAERS report summaries indicate the victim’s age even if the report officially lists the age as “unknown.” His analysis of reports shows that “there is more than double the amount of dead children” — 556 in total.

According to the complaint, the CDC failed to “reevaluate or rescind its blanket recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination,” and that ACIP is instead doubling down on its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.

The complaint cites this month’s ACIP meeting, during which the committee considered revising its blanket COVID-19 vaccine recommendation and switching to risk-based recommendations.

ACIP member Dr. Denise Jamieson opposed the proposal, claiming that the “U.S. has a history of not being able to implement such variable recommendations,” which would confuse the public.

“This is not merely arrogance,” the lawsuit states. “It is government-by-committee at its most dangerous — where unelected public health advisors retain extraordinary power to shape national policy.”

Attorney Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for CHD, questioned why the CDC added COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule even though they were not licensed, but only issued under emergency use authorization (EUA).

“It shocks the conscience,” Flores said. “Physicians in California must be free to exercise their best judgment, especially when it comes to administering experimental injections.”

Releasing the vaccines under EUA meant they were subject to less testing than a licensed vaccine, said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for CHD. “The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children. There are heavy compromises made when you skip the already insufficient regulatory steps with an emergency use authorization.”

‘Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor?’

In 2022, Sweden and Denmark stopped recommending COVID-19 shots for children. In 2023, the U.K. ended its COVID-19 booster program for healthy people ages 50 and younger. That year, the World Health Organization said healthy children and teens should be considered low priority for COVID-19 vaccines.

Several recent studies have also called the practice of vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19 into question.

A December 2024 study published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society found that children under 5 who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were more likely to become infected with COVID-19 than unvaccinated children with natural immunity.

A May 2024 preprint observational study of 1.7 million U.K. children and teenagers found myopericarditis only in the group that received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and that the vaccine provided only 14 to 15 weeks of protection against infection.

Pfizer documents publicized last year showed that the company quietly studied myocarditis in children a month before its COVID-19 vaccine received an EUA for children ages 5-11.

A peer-reviewed study published earlier this month in Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, found that young adults who received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine exhibited spike protein production a year or more after vaccination — significantly longer than the spike protein was expected to remain in the body.

Jaffe said the lawsuit “isn’t about vaccine skepticism. It’s about professional freedom, patient-level nuance, and constitutional limits on administrative coercion.”

“Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor? That’s what this case asks. And the answer should be ‘no.’”

Related articles in The Defender

• ‘Child Abuse on a Massive Scale’: CDC Advisers Recommend Adding COVID Vaccines to Childhood Schedule
• Young Adults Continue to Produce Spike Protein One Year After Receiving COVID Vaccine
• ‘Bombshell’ CDC Study: Kids Who Got Pfizer Vaccine More Likely Than Unvaccinated to Get COVID Infection
• Study of 1.7 Million Kids and Teens Who Got Pfizer COVID Vaccine Found Myopericarditis Only in Vaxed Groups
• Pfizer, CDC Withheld Evidence of Myocarditis After COVID Shots, New Documents Reveal
• Pfizer Quietly Studied Myocarditis in Children a Month Before FDA Authorized COVID Shots for Kids Ages 5-11